The Grouchy Editor

Mommie Dearest

Mother’s Day is just around the corner!  It seems to us that society does a poor job of celebrating these national treasures.  In case any of you have forgotten just how special motherhood is, here’s a gallery of some memorable moms:

                  Klara Hitler                                                      Andrea Yates

               Joyce Dahmer                                                  Casey Anthony

              Joan Crawford                                                      Susan Smith

So just remember:  If you, too, are lucky enough to have sex with a man and, nine months later, you squirt out a Homo sapien, then you, too, are well on your way to becoming a special someone!

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TV Update

Speaking of madcap mothers … Orphan Black (BBC America) is confusing but kind of fun.  Tatiana Maslany plays five clones — or possibly six, or maybe more than that —  who are on the run from someone out to get her — or them.  It takes place in Canada, or someplace like that.  But it’s a trip.

Bates Motel (A&E) is much better than I expected.  Freddie Highmore makes a fine, teenage Norman Bates, but Vera Farmiga, as mom Norma, is out of this world.

Both Black and Bates are about as realistic as a Martian invasion, but if you’re willing to buy into their bizarre worlds, they are wicked good.

More New Shows:  Inside Amy Schumer (Comedy Central) — possibly funny if you are a young, single woman; vulgar and lame if you are not.  Maron (IFC) — possibly amusing if you are a middle-aged, single man; a poor man’s Louie if you are not.

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I finally saw Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  My verdict:  way too long, painfully dull, self-indulgent and juvenile.  But Samuel L. Jackson kicks ass.

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The Jodi Arias trial is wrapping up, and Arias sure does seem guilty — especially to the carnival barkers on HLN.  HLN long ago dumped any pretense of objectivity when its clutch of show anchors chose to follow the lead of frothing-at-the-mouth Nancy Grace.  If avenging nutcase Grace walked past Jesus on the cross, she would demand that he be charged with loitering.

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Recently, I praised TLC’s Welcome to Myrtle Manor, pointing out the inherent sweetness of its trailer-park cast.  As you can see below, the Myrtle folks now have a lot in common with that other America’s Sweetheart, Reese Witherspoon.

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Gwyneth Paltrow Week!

It was quite a week for Gwyneth, who topped both Star magazine’s “Most Hated Celebrity” and People magazine’s “Most Beautiful People” lists.

I can’t get too excited for Gwyneth because, to me, she is a bit of a has-been whose most memorable role was as the severed head in Se7en (below), followed closely by her turn as some shapely buttocks in Shallow Hal (above — assuming they are not stunt buttocks).  It’s a tough call to say which was the better performance, so I’ll have to flip a coin:  heads or tails?

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Quote of the Week #1

“The guy who was stripped naked and then later set free, do we have any idea who he was?” — CNN’s Jake Tapper to Watertown’s police captain

The captain didn’t know.  I’ve been wondering about the naked guy.  That’s certainly a unique way to be introduced to the national news media, getting escorted to a police car with your junk exposed.

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Travis Alexander’s ex-girlfriend, Deanna Reid, took the stand at the Jodi Arias trial.  Her appearance might have explained a thing or two about Alexander’s fatal attraction to Arias.  If you were Travis Alexander, who would you choose?

                   The Travis Alexander Girlfriend Quiz:

      A)  Girl who wants to marry you, or …                                      B)  Homicidal maniac

     A)  Girl who wants to marry you, or …                                     B)  Homicidal maniac

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Quote of the Week #2

“Did he talk to you about blowing enormous loads every time?” — Arias attorney Kurt Nurmi to poor Deanna Reid.  HLN’s censor was apparently asleep at the wheel.

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Wanted?

“He was a complete jerk.”

“He frightened all of the children in the neighborhood.”

“When you saw him coming, you just wanted to deliver a good, swift kick to his ass.”

Those are comments you never hear about people like the Boston bombers (or serial killers).  Instead, we usually hear about what nice, quiet, unassuming fellows they were.

That is why society ought to celebrate the jerks in our midst, like the sweet man pictured above.  Jerks are generally harmless and always mean well.  We– er, they never cause problems.

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Events this week did not bring out the best in Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.  Within hours of the Boston bombing, O’Reilly was politicizing it, chastising President Obama for using the word “tragedy” to describe the attack.

O’Reilly loves to spring unusual words on his audience, but apparently he needs a definition of this simple, seven-letter word:

Even more distressing for O’Reilly, archenemy MSNBC showed up Fox (and CNN) by exhibiting restraint during Wednesday’s erroneous reports of the arrest of a suspect.  O’Reilly refused to acknowledge this embarrassment and chose to credit CBS — but not MSNBC — with a journalistic win.

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The Game was on cable.  It’s about the only movie I can watch, repeatedly, and laugh out loud with each viewing.  Michael Douglas’s performance as a harried business honcho is a comic masterpiece.

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I was so bored that I actually watched golf on television.  I’ve never understood why fans on the golf course are expected to watch the competition in absolute silence.  Same thing with tennis.  Player concentration, you say?  OK, then why aren’t fans shushed when a basketball player is at the free-throw line, trying to concentrate on a game-deciding shot?

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Word that needs to be banished from the advertising lexicon because it no longer means anything:  awesome.

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Quote of the Week:

“To be truly feminine means being soft, receptive, and — look out, here it comes — submissive.” — volleyball star Gabrielle Reece

No comment.

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20-Second Gripes

1:  If North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is as immature and hyper-sensitive as some experts seem to believe, maybe all of this satire by The Onion, Saturday Night Live, et al, isn’t such a great idea.

2:  Jimmy Fallon “interviewed” Rolling Stone Keith Richards and allowed Richards to actually speak for about 45 seconds.  Is it too late to rehire Leno?

3:  When I get up in the morning (or sometime), the first thing I do (OK, second thing, after the cigarette) is turn on cable news.  This, I’ve come to believe, is a mistake.  Some people get up and listen to music.  That has to be a healthier, happier way to greet the new day.

4:  Nightly cable news personalities, compared to the blithering idiots on morning talk shows, are a wealth of Mensa candidates.  Anderson Cooper, for example, apparently takes a stupid pill at some point between hosting his evening program on CNN and taping the syndicated crap he presides over during the day.

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Nice try, CNN.  You watched The Five on Fox, envied its ratings, studied its setup, and then devised your own camera-under-the-table-aimed-at-sexy-women’s-legs.  Sadly, The Point got the shaft.

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Quotes of the Week (courtesy of HLN and Jodi Arias)

                              Eiglarsh                                                                        Walsh

“She killed someone.  She murdered someone.  So this, to me, is a pimple on the butt of what she’s dealing with.” — attorney Mark Eiglarsh, about Arias using Twitter

“There’s something else I want to point out about this and other phone-sex conversations that I’ve heard between them [Arias and Travis Alexander].  You know, I’m a grown-up woman.  I’ve had some much better phone sex in my life.” — psychotherapist Wendy Walsh

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Thanks to the Jodi Arias trial, the blogosphere is discussing Cameron Diaz’s panties.  That’s a good enough excuse to run this picture of Cameron Diaz in panties.

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The Huffington Post is still in search of a few good editors.  Unless, of course, the Post has unearthed evidence that O’Reilly is is, indeed indeed, a victorious homosexual.

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 Ass You Like It

“Shake your wiener!” — Welcome to Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey, above

TV Report

Winning Me Back:  Welcome to Myrtle Manor.  OK, I’ll admit that a lot of this stuff is probably staged (how many trailer parks conduct beauty pageants?), but the knuckleheads at Myrtle Manor are an engaging bunch, gosh darn it.

Losing Me:  The Walking Dead.  Major, longtime characters keep getting killed off by the show’s writers, and I’m just fine with that, which is probably not what AMC’s producers have in mind.

Game of Thrones:  Downton Abbey for the dungeons and dragons crowd.  It’s soap opera, but so well-produced, well-acted, and visually arresting that it’s easy to get sucked in to its fantasy world.

Orphan Black:  I don’t know if it’s a good sign or a bad sign when your opening episode goes out of its way to showcase the heroine’s derriere.  OK, I’m lying; it’s definitely a good sign.

Basic-cable channels seem to occupy a nudity no-man’s land.  Not bold enough to flash full-frontal and too timid to bare boobs, basic channels opt instead for shapely rear ends.  So do we.  Keep up the good work, basic cable.

Tatiana Maslany and her two co-stars on the premiere of BBC America’s Orphan Black.

Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey doing what people usually do at trailer parks:  strutting her stuff in a beauty pageant.

Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke demonstrates why teenage boys want their parents to get HBO.

An extra on the set of AMC’s The Walking Dead.

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From New York magazine:

No, no, no.  Bad idea.  You’ll ruin the show for teenage boys and for … other people.  You want male nudity, go watch Spartacus.   Below, a gratuitous penis for Matt Zoller Seitz (and, of course, for Myrtle Manor “wiener girl” Chelsey).

Meanwhile, on Survivor, Brenda (below) strives for success.

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I haven’t been watching much Rachel Maddow lately.  She spends too much time on issues of great importance to a relatively small number of people, including gay rights.  But when Maddow turns to matters like government corruption or military misadventures, there’s no one better in cable news.  On Tuesday, she and Eliot Spitzer skewered former SEC chief Mary Schapiro, and it was terrific journalism.

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Two weeks ago, I introduced a “please let them be struck by lightning” list by spotlighting a pompous, irritating spokeswoman for AARP.  Money-grubbing, shameless Fred Thompson, shilling for AAG in the picture above, makes the list this week.

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The thumbs are all buried now, and that’s a bummer.

I thought Roger Ebert was a superb writer but a critic with … uh, peculiar taste.  But if you love movies, Ebert was a big part of your past, and it’s sad to see him go.

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These endless smoking bans and tax hikes are making me bitter.  A Norwegian professor named Bharat P. Bhatta says that fat people should pay more for airline tickets because they create more jet-fuel consumption.  Ten years ago, I would have said that was mean-spirited.  Not anymore.

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Evidently, there are only two issues that warrant media attention these days:  gun control and gay marriage.  I don’t own a gun and I’m not gay, so I do not, as they say, have a dog in these hunts — at least, not directly.  But all of this babble about “fairness” and “equality” is a joke to single Americans — gay and straight.  Here’s why.

(The article addresses single women, but most of the points apply to single men, as well.)

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It’s not often that I agree with the talking heads on Fox News and on MSNBC.  Dr. Keith Ablow (above), a talking bald head, was singing my tune when he said government should get out of the marriage business:  “That means:  No preferential treatment at tax time, no preferential treatment for married folks by insurance companies.  Everyone should be treated as an individual.”  Meanwhile, over at MSNBC,  Bob Franken was proposing pretty much the same thing:  time to dump unfair benefits for married people.

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Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box at a museum.  Performance art, or mental illness?

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Bill Carter of the New York Times has praise for Barbara Walters, who is said to be retiring next year:  “She was doing interviews with every big figure in the news at that point in her time.  She was part of that whole shuttle diplomacy era, flying back and forth in the Mideast between Begin and Sadat and all the other big figures, like Castro and Gaddafi and all these very famous figures in history.”

Depressing, because now we have Dennis Rodman doing that job.

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Here are pictures of Jeffrey Toobin getting clobbered outside of the Supreme Court.  I don’t know about you, but I enjoy seeing Jeffrey Toobin getting clobbered.

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Black Hysteria Month

Like O.J. before him, Tiger Woods is rebounding from scandal with the help of a blonde from Minnesota.  Tiger’s courtship techniques, well documented in text messages to a former flame in 2009, seem to work well for him.  Did the Woodsman dust off some of the charming gems reprinted below to woo Lindsey Vonn?

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Oprah is reportedly doing a sex scene in an upcoming film called The Butler.  Guess I’ll go ahead and cancel my cataract surgery, because I’d hate to accidentally see that.

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“I’m only in my 60s.  I’ve got a nice long life ahead:  big plans.” — woman in AARP commercial

I don’t usually wish physical harm on people, but if a bolt of lightning struck this smug woman, strutting through the woods as if she owns the world, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

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TV Report Card

Vikings — moderately entertaining, but no great shakes

Bates Motel — moderately entertaining, but no great shakes

Top of the Lake — moderately entertaining, but … the jury is out

Here’s the problem with AMC’s The Walking Dead.  The zombies are slow, stupid, and about as life-threatening as a June bug infestation.  The only time these sluggards pose a threat is when you are dumb enough to do something like sleep in a tent, outdoors in the woods.  Early on in this series, the heroes — you knew it — slept outdoors in tents in the woods.

Meanwhile, on The Americans:

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It’s been awhile since we checked in with the gang at Survivor:

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Hmmm … did someone on The Big Bang Theory get a boob job?

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Dumb Quote of the Week

“Lena Dunham, for instance, is totally great at being naked.” — Libby Gelman-Waxner in Entertainment Weekly.  If we need any more proof that men and women are from different planets, this quote ought to do the job.

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Who is this Roma Downey, a producer of History’s The Bible?  Is she the one who chain-smoked and hosted that 1980s talk show?  Or is she the actor who got sent to jail and drug rehab?

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Myrtle Manor “Wiener Girls” Chelsey and Lindsay (see below)

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Facebook honcho Sheryl Sandberg made the rounds plugging her new book, Lean In, in which she preaches that women can “have it all.”  Or so I heard — do you really think I read this stuff?

I figured that superwoman Sandberg, as part of her having it all, lays claim to some virile, race-car-driving husband.  Or possibly a pool-cleaning boy toy.  Here are two pictures.  Guess which dreamboat belongs to Sandberg.

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It was rather rich to see that anti-bullying crusader, Anderson Cooper, in Rome as part of the media’s collective kiss-ass over the Catholic Church’s latest  P.O.P. (protector of pedophiles).

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TV Report Card

Growing on me:  The Americans on FX

Beginning to lose me:  Welcome to Myrtle Manor on TLC

The two shows do have one thing in common …

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If I am ever on trial for my life, I will instruct my lawyers to reject any gravel-voiced, older females during jury selection.  I notice that on Nancy Grace’s program, an inordinate number of callers are gravel-voiced, older females, and they often seem to harbor vast quantities of hostility.  None of these angry ladies on my jury, if you please.

I picture these women at home, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a Camel in the other, glaring bitterly at their television screens.  Sort of like a couple of women on a well-known animated sitcom …

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It’s been much too long since we’ve heard from my favorite celebrity grouch, Daniel Craig.  Happily, Craig was in a New York supermarket when he encountered a picture-snapping fan.

“Is watching me food shopping with my wife really all that interesting to you?” Craig reportedly screamed as he snatched the offending camera.  That’s my boy.

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Will someone please explain to me the popularity of Justin Timberlake?  Are boundless energy and ubiquity the same thing as genuine talent?

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I watched the premiere of Welcome to Myrtle Manor on TLC.  There.  I said it.

Heaven help me, but I enjoyed the damned thing.  Pictured above is series regular Roy.  Roy is a hairdresser.  Pictured below are Myrtle Manor residents Anne (left) and Miss Peggy.  Miss Peggy is an exhibitionist, and Anne is … well, Anne.  Let’s all hope and pray that there are no tornado scares at the trailer park.

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Let me see if I have this straight.  Decades after the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda still gets spat on by angry veterans and denounced in Congress, but Dennis Rodman gets a pass for his love-fest (above) with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un?

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OK, America, let’s go ahead and legalize discrimination against smokers.  But while we’re at it, let’s also make sure that your fat husband can’t get a job and your alcohol-guzzling wife gets fired, because they are making the cost of my health insurance go up.

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Quote of the Week

“John Boehner can barely control his caucus.” — MSNBC’s Karen Finney.  I know how Boehner must feel, because there are times I can barely control my caucus.

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More good news for job-seekers:  They are still seeking a proofreader at The Huffington Post.

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Oscars Wrap-Up

Adele picked up an Oscar for her song from the movie Skyfall.  I’m thinking of calling the picture above, with Adele towering over Kristin Chenoweth, “Sunblock.”

Lending a touch of glamour to the proceedings, Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence, above left, and Anne Hathaway, right, posed for photographers after the big show.

I guess that when you have two gay guys producing the Academy Awards telecast, there is no way to avoid god-awful musical productions, but geez.  Perhaps they thought they were throwing a bone to heterosexual men with their “We Saw Your Boobs” number (above), but even that fell … uh, flat.

It takes a lot to steal the show from Adele, who sang the Oscar-winning “Sunblock,” but Barbra Streisand (“The Way We Were”) and especially Shirley Bassey (above, belting out “Goldfinger”) managed to do just that.

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Thank God that poor, downtrodden Ben Affleck got an Oscar so that we can all relax and stop feeling sorry for him.  Ben was inspirational when he told us how life had been a struggle for him, but that we should all follow his example and just keep on fighting.  And when the cameras cut to Ben’s movie-star wife shedding movie-star tears in the audience, I had to reach for some tissues.  Well, OK, so it wasn’t a tissue, but brown barf-bags are also made from trees.

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Quotes of the Week:

“At the time you were kissing Mr. Burns’s lips, did you know he was dead or not?” — prosecutor’s question for Jodi Arias at her murder trial on Monday.

The topic on Wednesday’s Red Eye was working from home.  Bill Schulz said, “The alone time does tend to make one odd … you watch a lot of weird stuff.”  Yes, like Red Eye at 2 o’clock in the morning on Wednesday.

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I’m having trouble following this “Blade Runner” business in Australia, possibly because it’s taking place in South Africa, not Australia.  The “Blade Runner,” legless Oscar Pistorius, is on trial for killing a model.  First, we got the shocking news that the trial prosecutor will also be tried for homicide.  Then we were again coldcocked, this time with reports that Pistorius’s brother will also be tried for homicide.  I fully expect to hear, any day now, that the judge is accused of some murderous rampage.

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Apparently, we were all supposed to be wowed over the retirement of that Catholic creep in Rome.  Why this pedophile protector isn’t moving out of the Vatican and into a prison cell is the real story, but you’d never guess that from fawning media coverage.

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Lots of exciting news at The Huffington Post.  They still have an opening for a proofreader, and secondly … well, here is my hopeful post in their comments section:

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At some point, haven’t we all?

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